By Daniel Demary

At ResearchGate, we design every product and enter every partnership with our mission in mind: we want everything we do to help connect the world of science and make research open to all. As a product analyst, I help to ensure that the decisions we make are data informed – especially when it comes to making the researcher’s job easier.

We began building ResearchGate Publisher Solutions in 2021 with the aim of aiding researchers in a seamless discovery process while facilitating better connections between journals and the authors they support. One of our first partnership initiatives took place in April of this year, when content from 17 of Wiley’s gold open access (OA) journals became accessible to researchers on the ResearchGate platform. In total, 11,000 articles were added from journals such as AGU Advances, Advanced Science, and Brain and Behavior.

ResearchGate and Wiley shared the same goals with this partnership: to make it easier for researchers to discover and access Wiley content, and to help authors increase the impact of their work by automatically adding their publications to the platform, which encourages interaction and connection with more readers.

In November, phase two of the partnership began, making publications from more than 100 additional Wiley journals accessible on the platform, this time from hybrid OA journals such as the American Journal of Hematology and Mathematical Methods in The Applied Sciences, as well as subscription journals such as Space Physics and Solid Earth.

The syndication of hybrid and subscription content brought an additional benefit to researchers: enabling them to access content directly on the ResearchGate platform using their institutional affiliation. This aids in a seamless discovery process in which researchers can read articles immediately on ResearchGate, without being redirected to other sites or the need to sign in through on-campus or online institutional library systems.

Results

When we added the hybrid open access and subscription content, we started collecting data from our members to understand if these changes were having the positive impact we expected. Between November 21st and the time this post was published, we surveyed 524 readers and 238 Wiley authors who are members of ResearchGate. So far:

• 98% of authors stated that they’re happy with the automatic upload of their work to ResearchGate.
• 70% of authors said they believed the availability of their article on ResearchGate would increase the impact of their research in their field.
• 91% of authors surveyed said they would be more likely to submit to a journal if they knew their article would be automatically shared on ResearchGate.
• 87% of readers agree that the collaboration between ResearchGate and Wiley improved their full-text reading experience.

The hybrid and subscription content has only been accessible for the last month, so it will take some time before we really see how the addition of this type of content impacts researchers. However, the positive responses from readers and authors show us that we’re on the right track. Many respondents have already told us that they felt our partnership with Wiley has not only made it easier for researchers to access content relevant to their work, but also helped make their job easier by saving them valuable time. We look forward to seeing more positive results from this partnership in the months to come.